Manifesto de NaDA
“Want nothing, fulminate against everything
de NaDa Manifesto
It is common knowledge that De naDa means nothing and the Spanish often use this as a response when thanked for something, e.g., “de nada” because it was nothing at all to do the favour...but let’s not waste time over a word that means nothing but rather on it’s implications of everything.
We exist in a vacuous materialist world, beware the bestial desires of buy, buy, buy. Consumer or fallen comrade, caution against the stomach ache of glutinous spending, it will leave you empty and full of nada. Is it only after all is bought and all sold a trillion times that the purity of nothing will emerge as the new avant-garde.
Nothing has arrived but so many missed it.
De naDa; the art of negation, for nothing and against everything.
Every woman and man must prepare: there is much subtractive work to be done. To sweep, to clean away the vestiges of macerated consumerism and unadulterated greed of those nouveau riche who bought everything.
Trinket value nada.
We the avant-garde await the call to arms. Ever ready comrades - our mail; oil stained aprons and smocks. Our arsenal; sable hair (keep those brushes loaded). We work on the grandest propaganda. We the valiant avant-garde see clearly the result of greed and will paint our disgust; just as our fallen comrades of the historic avant-garde painted the horrors of war, the blindness of nationalism, stood up against the fanatic fascists with supreme line and ‘wild beastly’ colour all the while assembling the new technology and industry. Just as then the world has gone mad; death and loss, fear and loathing, greed and materialism reign and no one is listening; the BLASTS of non stop advertising wont allow it...and now that all is lost and the world completely desensitized we the brave and inventive will employ irony and humour (just as our forebears of Dada) to show the senseless loss of charity.
Advance, advance comrades of compassion and reason. Shake up the system. Knock down the old orders and institutions. Establish new ideas. Burn the waste paper buildings of the bureaucrats. Paint your dreams...for reality is not worth a peseta in a surgical mask. Shake society out of its “Your either with us or against us” self-righteousness.
This is a call for artistic anarchy, crush the cubist boxes of unacceptable stereotypes or be like the cubists and see it all from a variety of view points. Express you darkest fears, action your anxiety, your insanity and SCREAM with horrified delight at this new and original art created, in spite of it all and because of it all.
Those philosophical avant-gardes behind the iron curtain attacked with rayonist rays that pierced through the capitalist devourers, the vortists pushed the point with lines and designs in an attempt to make those power hungry demons give up the fight. Constructivists showed cold Russian industry stacked up against the impossible plight of the pitiful peasant bravely raising hammer and sickle; “Warsaw has fallen” they cried with disbelief in Poland, fear and instability gripped our hearts, but wait then came Der Blaue Reiter with their fortified shields of abstraction closely followed by our troupes at the Bauhaus and De Stijl whose simplicity and perfection of design descended upon the unsuspecting tanks of those stuffy polished boots in khaki and insignia.
Now our new art will disturb those hateful capitalist bourgeoisie on whom we have had to rely. De Nada is doomed to fail but like our beloved bohemians of the historical avant-garde we are eager, dedicated, honorable and resolute, our success will carry through and be measured against each new movement that rises in the name of the new. We will see our ‘vanguard’ rise to the fore whenever battles are waged in the name of beliefs and ideals for we know what hides behind those words; power and money, death and destruction.
All of this is enough to make one stark raving DADA...so don your bowler hat and embrace the ridiculous until it’s all over—or do ‘nothing’ after all once the new has been discovered it is passé and no longer belongs to the avant-garde.
Consequently a return to the simplicity of nothing will undoubtedly produce something.
“BLAST” says the De naDaist who wants for nothing.
The transitory nature of nothingness is as frustrating as the fleeting feeling of transcendence. Catch that nothing whenever you can De naDaist and explore it’s multifaceted emptiness. The suppleness of nothingness is an undefinable beauty and an inescapable eventuality. As the universe expands it knows that soon enough the process of contraction will begin towards that desired state of nothingness...
De naDa; respect all individualities and their folly. De naDa; the abolition of stock markets, banks and credit cards (cut them up for a piece of deconstructive art). De naDa; abolition of filthy carbon. De naDa; Injustice, prejudice, war and malice. De naDa; inaction, contraction, irony, blankness, contradiction, undecided, irrelevance. De naDa; abolition of all logical accumulations: abundance: exponentials.
But here we approach the great secret.
De Nada is an open state of mind that can hold nothing. De Nada applies itself to nothing, and yet it is everything, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet.
Like nothing in life de nada is useless.
De Nada is without pretension—without anything, as life should be and if it doesn’t suit you do not despair simply "dance to your own boom-boom" (quote Tristian Tzara: Dada Manifesto).
Liana Vargasneitske
References
Tristian Tzara, 1918 Dadaist Manifesto http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/tzara.html
Scrivner, Lee: How to Write a Manifesto. The London Consortium, April , 2006
Breton, Andre Breton: Manifesto of Surrealism 1924 http://www.tcf.ua.edu
Situationist Manifesto: http://www.infopool.org.uk/6003.html
Tzara, Tristan “Dadaist Manifesto”
Marinetti, F.T: The Futurist Manifesto.
